Connected TV (CTV)
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
CTV is the one channel in a UK plan where a business audience survives the translation almost intact, because the buying vocabulary can carry consent-chained B2B segments — Bombora intent topics, Dun & Bradstreet decision-maker segments — rather than only age and postcode. AdBuyMCP grades a compiled CTV plan at 85 out of 100 and person-level when at least one of those segments matches strongly, dropping to 65 and then 60 as the evidence weakens. That is the highest score anywhere in the system and it is still a projection: 85 means the best available proxy for a named audience, not a match on one. The segments carry a data cost of roughly £2.50 to £3.00 per thousand impressions, which appears on the plan rather than being absorbed into the price.
Goes deeper: How CTV compiles
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Addressable TV
Television advertising where different households watching the same programme at the same time receive different adverts, swapped in at the set-top box or in the stream. It is bought on household attributes and geography rather than on programme and time slot.
Programmatic advertising
Buying advertising through automated systems that decide, impression by impression, whether to bid and how much to pay for it. It describes the transaction mechanism rather than a channel: CTV, audio, DOOH and display can all be bought programmatically.
Audience segment
A named group of people a seller will let you target, defined by some combination of demographics, behaviour, stated interest or inferred intent, and identified in a buying system by a specific identifier.
Fidelity score
A published score out of 100 answering one question: how much of an audience definition survives translation into a channel's native targeting words. It is a property of that translation rather than a forecast, and it is not a quality rating.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through